Science· 2025Q1· Review
Porous materials: The next frontier in energy technologies
- 129citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2025year
Short summary
Porous materials, with pore sizes from angstroms to centimeters, are critical for optimizing energy transfer (mass, charge, heat, radiation, pressure) and surface area in diverse energy technologies.
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Key points
- Porous materials are vital for energy technologies, enabling control over energy transfer vectors.
- Pore sizes range from angstroms to centimeters, impacting material function.
- Optimization involves balancing energy stream flow (mass, charge, heat, etc.) with surface area per device volume.
- Recent advances in design, characterization, and modeling are driving breakthroughs in porosity-based energy solutions.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Porous materials with pore sizes spanning the range from molecular to macroscopic dimensions (from angstroms to centimeters) are essential in electrochemical, thermoelectric, nuclear, and solar power sources and in the extraction of oil, gas, and geothermal heat. To enable the clean, fast, and efficient conversion of energy, the porous structure must be designed to allow, modulate, or block the flow of energy transfer vectors. The most important energy streams are mass, charge, heat, radiation, and pressure, and they must be optimized while packing the optimal surface area per device volume. In this Review, we analyze the physical processes that enable energy transfer in porous structures, highlighting recent advances in the design, characterization, modeling, and fundamental understanding of porosity that have enabled breakthroughs across the landscape of energy technologies.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Science, 2025 · DOI ↗
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Field: Computational Mechanics
Computational MechanicsEngineering